Tag: dialogue

Vocation and Purity—Let’s Be Honest

This post presents an imagined dialogue between Sarah and her mentor Joel, exploring the conflict between support of authentic vocational exploration for students and the pursuit of an idealized programmatic outcome. They discuss the dangers of constraining students with pre-imagined paths, emphasizing the need for individual differences and a more flexible approach to discernment.

This post is framed as an imagined dialogue between two friends: Joel is a mentor to the narrator, Sarah. In what follows, Sarah narrates a conversation between the the two of them about an ongoing tension between authentically helping students with vocational discernment and aiming at the ideal and pre-imagined results of programmatic “purity.”

brown wooden table with chairs
Photo by Kampus Production on Pexels.com

My friend Joel sat at a coffeehouse table in the sun with a small stack of art books and his notebook. When I arrived, he welcomed me, no matter that I was a little late for our appointment yet again. He and I have been meeting frequently since right after I arrived on campus in my new role as lead vocational counselor.

The last time we met, Joel had made a cautionary remark about purity that I wanted to follow up on. When I sat down, he smiled broadly and began chatting about spring flowers, as the two of us share a keen interest in plants and gardening. On this day, he had been reading and writing about the American painter, Philip Guston; Joel’s writing about his reading seems to be an admirable life habit.

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What Are We Creating Together?

Last semester, our communication studies department came to realize fully what we had known for years: vocation exploration is something that can and should be done in community. Inspired by our current NetVUE work, we have committed to extending our vocation conversations beyond regular advisement and an occasional instructional nod to using vocation as a primary dialogue topic in several classes in our major and minor.

Major Decisions, Major Discoveries: Exploring Vocation in the Undergraduate Years, a series of posts from Nebraska Wesleyan University about helping students develop meaning and purpose as part of their major coursework 

“I was amazed that something so personal like exploring my ‘purpose’ or ‘meaning’ in a group could feel so right.”

NWU communication studies student

Last semester, our communication studies department came to realize fully what we had known for years: vocation exploration is something that can and should be done in community. Inspired by our current NetVUE work, we have committed to extending our vocation conversations beyond regular advisement and an occasional instructional nod to using vocation as a primary dialogue topic in several classes in our major and minor. Our department’s guiding principle is inspired by W. Barnett Pearce and Vernon Cronen’s “Coordinated Management of Meaning,” which posits that we create meaning and manage our social reality in community. “What are we creating together?” is emblazoned on our brochures and syllabi and even stenciled on our walls as a reminder that we co-construct our environment—we have agency over and responsibility for our co-created relationships. Our students resonate so deeply with this principle that a recent graduate decorated her mortar board with it.

Photo by the author
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Giving and receiving advice

Suggestions for how to use “Vocational Advice for Undergraduates” (podcast episode) in your work with students.

What advice would you give to a young adult today?

We ask a version of this question to each of our guests on the NetVUE podcast, Callings. The answers are varied, alternating between encouragement and gentle warning, the pragmatic and the more idealistic. In a “bonus episode” to round out season one, we compiled those words of advice in an episode called “Vocational Advice for Undergraduates.” The advice-givers include Darby Ray, Eboo Patel, Amanda Tyler, Rabbi Rachel Mikva, Father Dennis Holtschneider, and Shirley Showalter. 

At just over 30 minutes in length, the episode offers a taste of the other, hour-long conversations and our hope is that you will go back and listen to the ones that pique your interest, if you have not already listened to the earlier episodes.

Because of its brevity, and because the advice is directed at young adults, you might also consider using this episode in your work with undergraduates. Here are some ideas for how you might do that.

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Pivotal Moments

An interview with Scott Mattingly, Associate Dean of Academic Life at DeSales University about a new course he developed called “Pivotal Moments: Fulfilling Your Potential in Times of Change,” which was featured in a recent Teaching newsletter published by The Chronicle of Higher Education. Scott taught a pilot version of the course as a one-credit elective this past spring. The interview has been edited for this blog.

Tell us a little bit about the course and how it came into existence. 

I am part of a group at DeSales University that has been charged with facilitating a faculty-driven process for revising our general education curriculum. As that process has unfolded, we have come to believe that we need a capstone course and we are interested in giving students an opportunity to bring together the entirety of their experience, inside and outside the classroom. And the mission of our institution emphasizes more than just job preparation; the importance of holistic well-being, thriving rather than just surviving – those are also important components of a DeSales education. So another aspect to this capstone is that we want to give students a chance to reflect on their identity and purpose – the existential, big questions. So that’s where I started, where we started.

I was pondering that in the back of my mind and then we had these twin pandemics in 2020 with the killing of George Floyd and obviously COVID-19. And I found myself thinking that our students need a way to process what is happening. They are going to do that as part of their social networks and there are probably some courses where it might come up, and maybe some opportunities for programming that students could optionally choose to attend where these things might come up, but I felt like there needed to be something a little more intentional, a little more structured, something that involved the faculty in guiding students through that process.

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Twelve Ground Rules for Dialogues on Difference

To develop an authentic sense of self in a context that is increasingly characterized by diversity and confusion, we need to think about what voices we hear (and don’t) and to which we should listen (or not). As a nation and as individuals we are in deep need of dialogue across the differences that divide us.

Diversity is a fact of life. All societies are internally diverse, but some types of diversity provoke social anxiety. We are very comfortable with diversity in sports, fashion, cuisine, in fact such diversity is encouraged. But diversity that calls into question our assumptions and most cherished ideas about meaning in the world trigger deep-seated anxieties about the order of the cosmos. Challenges to our preconceived ideas of how the world is organized risk what Peter Berger called the “terror of anomy” (The Sacred Canopy, 26); they risk undermining our trust in meaning and order in the universe. Challenges to normative views on religions, politics, race, and gender, for example, create powerful anxiety. Such fears divide us. Talking about these differences requires courage and overcoming these fears requires we talk to people who are different.

To develop an authentic sense of self in a context that is increasingly characterized by diversity and confusion, we need to think about what voices we hear (and don’t) and to which we should listen (or not). As a nation and as individuals we are in deep need of dialogue across the differences that divide us. Drawing upon David Tracy’s description of “conversation,” I offer suggestions for dialogues about and across the differences that divide us constructive.

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Vocational Discernment Is Not a Luxury

The discernment of vocation is not a luxury; rather, it is an imperative born out of a deep awareness of the insistent realities we experience in our lives and our response to them.

Like many people, I find that in this time of pandemic crisis information helps me to feel calmer and more able to cope with the stress of the unknown. While the facts and figures provide a necessary base of knowledge, I find myself most drawn to pieces that offer experiences of and reflections upon how people are making meaning in the midst of the staggering numbers of infections and deaths and the economic disaster that has been a result of this public health emergency. I search for these reflections as a lifeline to hope and for the things they teach about courage, commitment and calling.

One of the most moving pieces I have read highlights the experience of vocational commitment of hospital chaplains who work in New York City area hospitals in the center of the pandemic storm. I was particularly struck when, after detailing the rigors and extreme challenges of chaplains’ work right now, the author comments, “If anything can shake a person’s faith, it seems an indiscriminate epidemic like this would be just the ticket. Why does a person in one bed die while the person in the next bed recovers? And yet not one chaplain I spoke to said this outbreak had done anything to diminish his or her faith or sense of purpose.”

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